Several attempts have been made in the past to achieve efficient interactive communication of medical or health information between a subject or patient and a reviewer or provider of that information. However, in general, previous systems have limited the user to the general location in which the device was located. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,441,047, images and data were transmitted by standard telephone lines or wireless telemetry systems.
Even where devices are portable, as in the case of a laptop computer with a modem, an ordinary POTS phone line must be found and used. Where the user's computer employs a broadband connection, such as DSL or satellite, the choices of location are even more limited.
Attempts have been made to remedy this deficiency. As noted above, some telemetry systems allow a “wireless” distance to be placed between a health measuring unit and a remote monitoring system. However, such systems are limited in their range.
Other systems have used cellular telephone technology to increase the wireless health monitoring range. However, these systems have several deficiencies, such as requiring significant modification of the mobile phone. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,772,586, issued Jun. 30, 1998 to Heinonon et al., discloses a method for monitoring the health of a patient. This system uses a specialized connection between the patient health measuring unit and the cellular phone, however. The patient health measuring unit is located in the battery space of the mobile phone and is connected to a communication bus of the mobile phone. Other systems have been proposed, but these suffer from similar deficiencies in that they require specially modified cellular phones to be employed.
The deployment of the above systems also currently lacks employment of full back-end server functionality with which to provide a wide range of interactive communication with the patient. Instead, such systems, if internet-enabled, are often limited to mere one-way non-interactive data transfer via a modem.